The global population is expected to grow the entire 21st century. What do we know about the relationship between population growth and migration? How may future migrations look like? What are the current global migration dynamics?

This Argumenta seminar addresses various aspects of interconnections between population growth and migration from interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral perspectives. The keynote speakers are IIASA World Population Program Director Wolfgang Lutz and Bela Hovy (Chief, Migration Section, Population Division, United Nations). In addition to the keynote speeches, the two-day seminar includes workshops. The first day of the seminar is open to the public and the second day workshops are for invited guests only.

Lutz is invited keynote speaker at this conference. Since 1984 at IIASA, Lutz has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projection, and the interaction between population and environment. Together with his colleagues at POP, he has been expanding demographic methods to make them more relevant for the analysis of contemporary global policy challenges. He is an advocate in promoting the crucial role of education for dealing with future challenges.

Under the leadership of Lutz, IIASA together with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has recently published a new book entitled "Demographic and human capital scenarios for the 21st century". It examines potential future scenarios on population trends across the world, taking into account migration, fertility, mortality, education, and labor force participation. The work was conducted in the framework of the Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration (CEPAM) a collaboration between IIASA’s World Population Program and the JRC. The CEPAM partnership was launched to provide comprehensive assessments of the drivers of possible future migration to Europe and study the implications of alternative future migration scenarios that could help to inform European policies from 2019 onwards. The book presents an essential background study for that work.

The seminar is held at the University of Turku on August 14 and organized by Finland Futures Research Centre and the Migration Institute of Finland.